Jan. 21--Sarah Palin, like Donald Trump, the presidential candidate she endorsed this week, is a blank screen.
You can project whatever you want on her and she'll willingly reflect back what you wish to see. If you hate President Barack Obama and yearn for some idealized vision of America, she'll blame all the world's ills on him and then reassure you that the straight-talking Mama Grizzly wrapped in an American flag is going to make everything OK.
If you're paranoid about the government, she'll be paranoid with you. If you think someone's coming for your guns, she'll confirm that unfounded fear.
She's the affirmation of your deepest concerns, a defender of American values and the comforting reminder that the problems you face aren't your fault, and that you're not alone.
She is, in other words, a charlatan of the highest order.
Agna Hurst was at a Trump/Palin rally Wednesday in Oklahoma and told Bloomberg: "With Sarah Palin, I just can feel it, she speaks from her heart."
Respectfully, no she doesn't, Ms. Hurst. She speaks from YOUR heart.
She wants to be what you want her to be, so you'll support her, and buy her books, and donate money to her super PAC, and ignore the fact that her family is hypocrisy come to life.
She is not sincere. She is not smart. And she is not a good person.
How else can you reconcile her decision at Wednesday's rally to take her son's recent arrest on domestic violence charges and blame it, effectively, on Obama. She cited her son's post-traumatic stress disorder from military service -- no small matter, of course -- and then implied that Obama's handling of America's veterans and the way they are cared for led her son to, according to a police report, punch his girlfriend in the face, kick her in the knee and threaten suicide with an AR-15 rifle.
She made no comment about the woman, who police say hid under a bed in the Palin home crying. She made no reference to the many soldiers who suffer PTSD and don't commit violent assaults. She made no reference to the fact that, despite this country's pitiful treatment of veterans and their mental health, she is a millionaire entertainer who could undoubtedly afford to get her son the best treatment available.
Paul Rieckhoff, the head of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, told NBC News: "It's not President Obama's fault that Sarah Palin's son has PTSD. PTSD is a very serious problem, a complicated mental health injury and I would be extremely reluctant to blame any one person in particular."
Anyone with half a brain and a modicum of decency would be reluctant to blame one person for such a problem. But Palin has no such decency. She took Trump's stage and used it to shift responsibility for her son's actions onto someone else, and to play into the everything-is-Obama's-fault narrative she knows her admirers want to hear.
So goes the party of personal responsibility.
Trump is no better. His thousands-strong audiences are coming to his rallies and hearing their own fears and biases and suspicions projected back at them.
They've spent years listening to politicians promise them legislative acts that were never remotely possible -- repeal Obamacare, defund Planned Parenthood, ban gay marriage -- and now they're rightfully angry. When you're angry, nothing feels better than having someone validate that anger and throw it right back at you five times louder and angrier.
But getting duped by one set of people only to be duped by another isn't progress. Palin and Trump do nothing but spout platitudes and make vague promises based on zero actual policy proposals.
They're a match made in reality television heaven, fabulists who feather their own nests by telling you the world's crumbling and they're the only ones who can patch it up.
It's like the old musical, "The Music Man." Con man Harold Hill rolls into River City, Iowa, and convinces the locals that they have trouble, selling them a solution that will never come.
Hill sings to the people: "Well, either you're closing your eyes to a situation you do not wish to acknowledge, or you are not aware of the caliber of disaster indicated."
That pretty well sums you up if you're buying what Palin and Trump are selling.
All politicians are con artists, to one degree or another. But these two are the worst kind.
They shout the things people want to hear shouted and they accept responsibility for nothing, giving others permission to do the same.
They're blank screens. Empty souls. And terribly, terribly bad for the country they claim to love.
rhuppke@tribpub.com
